Fitting religious life into the life of schools. James and Rorty in conversation

ABSTRACT

The article investigates which epistemological considerations justify how religious life fits into the school life, and examines the debate on the participation of religiosity in the education system. I do this, first, by addressing the pedagogical implications of the distinction between public and private as maintained by Richard Rorty and, second, by reconsidering the pluralist metaphysics held by William James as an alternative path to understanding and re-addressing the question of religious life in school life. The article analyzes how the strict separation of projects of individual self-creation and the public sphere, as defended by Rorty, poses problems in implementing pluralism in democratic societies and their educational institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Religiousness
• schooling
• pluralism
• Richard Rorty
• William James

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The history of Spanish philosophy from the 1980s and 1990s was especially concerned with matters of public ethics, and can only be understood from that concern, expressed in writers such as Fernando Savater, Adela Cortina, and Javier Muguerza.

2. To get acquaintance with this discussion in Spain, I would suggest the reading of Trilla (2018), Ibáñez-Martín (2017), and Gracia and Gozálvez (2016).

3. In relation to the study of the main criticism Rorty’s work sparked, it is worth mentioning a collection published by his disciple and fellow-in-controversy, Brandom (2000). In it, twelve similarly minded philosophers (although to different extents) present and discuss the main characteristics of Rorty’s work. Brandom gives a rebuttal to each. Close reading of these rebuttals make Rorty difficult to fit into the ‘superficial philosopher’ category into which some of his detractors have attempted to put him. One may or may not agree with his statements, which at times may seem quite eccentric, but not taking him seriously would be a mistake.

4. ‘ … a “poet” in my wide sense of the term – the sense of “one who makes things new,”’ (Rorty 1993, 12).

5. See, ‘Religion as Conversation-stopper’ (Rorty 1994), ‘Anticlericalism and atheism’ (Rorty 2001), or ‘Religion in the Public Sphere: A Reconsideration’ (Rorty 2003b).

6. Simon Critchley (2012) in The Faith of the Faithless, questions the very possibility of having a discussion on these matters without appealing to any principles of some kind.

7. His essay ‘The Will to Believe’ appeared in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy published in 1897. It was given as a paper at the philosophy clubs at Yale and Brown University, and was initially published in 1896 in the journal New World.

8. As Castillo rightly puts it (2016, 63), James tried his best to show agnostics how there were no acceptable reasons for opposing other peoples’ rights to hold on religious beliefs.

9. The reference to ‘James’ pluralist metaphysics’ is taken from Garrison (2002). However, James works are filled with a deep preoccupation towards metaphysics. Philosophy is essentially an intellectual attempt to come to grips with reality, as he says on the first page of Pragmatism. James intended Some Problems of Philosophy to be largely a textbook in metaphysics, which he defines in terms of the ultimate principles of reality, both within and beyond our human experience. Much of it concerns the issue of the one and the many, which is arguably the oldest problem of Western philosophy and represents the split between collective monism (such as Hegel’s) and distributive pluralism (such as James himself advocates).